Airship 2.0: Inside the Lighter-Than-Air Revival

With an approach to buoyancy that's borrowed from submarines, a scrappy California company attempts to fulfill a century-old vision of cargo ships in the sky. Meet the team behind the Aeroscraft, which flew outside its hangar for the first time last week.

On a Thursday morning last January, a team of engineers gathered in a hulking concrete hangar in the Orange County suburb of Tustin, Calif. The hangar—once used to build and store massive blimps that patrolled the coast during World War II—was an imposing sight, an anachronism amid the manicured pods of suburban town homes and outdoor malls nearby. The vehicle inside, a prototype airship known as the Aeroscraft, was just as much of a spectacle: 266 feet long and 96 feet wide, with a rigid aluminum and carbon-fiber skeleton covered by a thin skin of shimmery silver Mylar. Squat and bulbous, the craft looked like one of those massive, gentle whale sharks, a giant willing to share the seas with less majestic creatures.

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A couple of the engineers crowded into the compact glass cockpit suspended from the belly of the ship, sat down at the controls, and the massive airship lifted slowly from the concrete. It was 10, 20, and finally 30 feet in the air. Then, with the push of a button, the ship's innovative buoyancy system went into descent mode and the Aeroscraft fell to the ground.

The January test was modest. The engineers called it a first float, as opposed to a first flight. The first test outside the hangar, performed earlier this month after a necessary FAA certification was granted, was only slightly more ambitious. But the dream behind the airship is expansive.

Nathaniel Wood

Nathaniel Wood

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Its inventor, Ukrainian-born engineer Igor Pasternak, has dreamed since childhood of building huge airships that would crisscross the skies ferrying freight. He is just one in a long line of believers, stretching back at least as far as the German count Ferdinand von Zeppelin, who built the first rigid airship in the 1890s. "The idea has been around for over a hundred years," says John Hansman, a professor of aeronautics at MIT and director of the university's International Center for Air Transportation. By the mid-20th century, lighter-than-air craft had completed more than 150 transatlantic passenger trips. During World War II, American airships carried supplies, bombs, even planes capable of being launched and retrieved from the air. But then the technology stalled—for good reason, Hansman says. "Once you started having airplanes that could make the long-range flight and carry a lot of payload, the market quickly shifted."

Today, most lighter-than-air ships are blimps—basically oversize balloons acting as billboards. Still, the dream of rigid airships carrying freight has been resurrected. In the past decade, no fewer than half a dozen companies have invested millions toward the goal. So far, they have little to show for it. But Pasternak and his partners believe they will succeed where others have failed, thanks mainly to the Aeroscraft's buoyancy system, a technology that has been decades in development. Tony Tether ran the military's DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) program from 2001 to 2009 and now serves on Aeros's advisory board. "It's as big a deal as Kitty Hawk," he says with confidence. "This will change the way we deliver cargo, and maybe people, around the world."

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When I visited the Tustin hangar in May, the Aeroscraft was skinned like a fish. The Mylar exterior draped off the lower frame, while above the complex skeleton and a row of watermelon-shaped bladders were left exposed. The huge car-sized bladders, which store compressed helium, lie at the heart of the Aeroscraft's buoyancy system, which is based on submarine technology.

One of the lead engineers, 32-year-old Tim Kenny, walked me through the system. Submarines draw in seawater to descend deeper, then pump it out to increase buoyancy and rise toward the surface. The Aeroscraft works the same way, he explained, using air as a substitute for water. Kenny walked me over to one of the helium bladders. Empty, it weighed 500 pounds. Right now, filled with helium the same way a child's balloon might be, it needed an anchor. I was able to push the car-sized melon out of place with two fingers. But once it is pumped full of highly compressed helium, Kenny explained, each bladder becomes boulder-like, like a full propane tank for a backyard grill.

Next, Kenny pointed out several large, white expansion tanks. When the airship's helium is compressed inside of the bladders, a partial vacuum develops around the expansion tanks and they fill up with air from outside the craft. Buoyancy drops and the ship descends. "Once the bladders release that stored helium back into the main envelope, the expansion tanks deflate to neutralize the internal pressure of the airship and force the air—the ballast—outside the aircraft," he said. More of the ship's volume is occupied by helium and the ship rises.

Conventional airships need to take on ballast (typically water) to compensate for the weight of cargo once it is delivered. They need ground crews, and many need runways, though admittedly much shorter ones than an airplane. An operating Aeros would require none of that—nor really any infrastructure at all. The machine could fly to a roadless track of Arctic wilderness, settle down to the tundra to unload mining equipment, and take off again on its own. It could deliver immense wind turbines, hovering like a helicopter yet bearing loads normally associated with ocean freighters, and do it at faster-than-railroad speeds.

The biggest challenge in achieving that capability has been the system's weight—the heavy tanks, pumps, and hull structure. "People did not believe that you could do all of that and end up with something which could float," Tether says. To solve that problem, Aeros engineers became obsessive ounce watchers. The first skeleton they made was constructed of fiberglass and aluminum and collapsed under a small load. During my tour Kenny handed me a 6-foot piece of carbon-fiber-and-aluminum truss, the material that makes up the airship's skeleton. It was disconcertingly light.

Nathaniel Wood

Nathaniel Wood

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Even Hansman, who remains skeptical of the airship industry's future, believes the technology could work. "It's definitely possible. There's no physics that would prevent them from doing what they want to do. It's just hard—hard technically, in terms of financing, and having the persistence to get there."

Igor Pasternak was wearing a pin-striped suit, a pink tie, and sunburst-patterned suspenders beneath a wild mop of gray hair when we met at his office at the headquarters of Worldwide Aeros—two buildings tucked into an office park in suburban Montebello, Calif. He says he has been was obsessed with airships from the time he was 10 years old. "I've been doing this all my life, just nothing else," he said.

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Pasternak was born in what is today Kazakstan and grew up in Ukraine, the son of Soviet civil engineers. After graduating with an advanced engineering degree, he started building aerostats for advertising and environmental monitoring in the 1980s, as Gorbachev's perestroika got started. By the early 1990s Pasternak had 60 employees and was selling and leasing his 3000 oversize, unmanned balloons throughout the Soviet bloc and beyond. Everything, he says, came from his own imagination and experimentation. "I was creating technology. You don't have textbooks, you don't have any examples."

Then the Soviet Union collapsed. "There was only one decision," Pasternak says. "To build something like the Aeroscraft, you need to be in America." He immigrated in 1994 and spend his first few months in New York. One day he saw then-president Clinton on the news, announcing the closure of California's Castle Air Force Base, a former B-52 testing site. By the next year Pasternak and a handful of employees with heavy accents were building balloons in a facility that still smelled of the Cold War. "It was a bunch of Russians and B-52s—same hangar!"

Pasternak built manned airships for advertisers: for the 1996 Atlanta Olympic games, for MasterCard, for tourism boards. After Sept. 11, the in-sky advertising market dried up, but the Department of Defense was looking into blimps for monitoring and missile defense. Pasternak eventually secured $35 million to build his Aeroscraft, a process that took close to five years and involved building a team of engineers who share Pasternak's scrappy style. "You need to know how to hold a screwdriver," he says—not just how to run computer modeling programs. "It's mechanics. Mechanics is part of the engineering." As a second requirement Pasternak only hires employees who have virtually no experience with airships. "We are not hiring anyone from mainstream industry," Pasternak says. "We are grabbing the people who don't already know what is impossible."

Nathaniel Wood

Nathaniel Wood

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The Aeroscraft that sits in Pasternak's hangar is the biggest rigid-hulled airship built in the United States since the 1940s. But it's tiny compared with the full-scale transport vehicle that Pasternak imagines. He sees a fleet of 555-foot-long airships with a 66-ton cargo capacity. Eventually Pasternak wants a 250-ton version that would be 770 feet long—three times the length of a Boeing 747.

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With airships, bigger is better. The reason is what's called the cube–square law, says aerospace engineer Robert Boyd, head of the hybrid airship program at Lockheed Martin. "If you take a ship—or an airship—and you double its length, that makes the surface area go up by roughly four, that's the square," Boyd explains. "And it makes the volume go up by roughly eight, which is the cube." The square represents the bad things—drag and weight. The cube represents the good: primarily, lift. "So as you get larger, the good things grow much faster than the bad things," Boyd says. That has a huge impact on efficiency, and Lockheed knows it: In January 2006, the company flew a 120-foot prototype called the P-791. Lockheed's largest proposed version of the airship would be 800 to 900 feet long and haul about 100 tons.

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Airships have some widely accepted advantages over fixed-wing planes. The Pentagon's U.S. Transportation Command published a study about a decade ago that concluded that large airships could transport goods long distances at one-third the cost of fixed-wing cargo aircraft. They would ultimately cost about a third as much to build as a 747, and would use a third as much fuel.

Of course, they have weaknesses, as well. The Aeroscraft's top cruising speed is predicted to be about 115 mph, versus more than 500 mph for a fixed-wing airplane such as the Boeing 747. And bad weather presents unique challenges. A big airship of any design is "probably less sensitive [than airplanes] to things like turbulence because it's so big—kind of like an ocean liner as compared with a rowboat," MIT's Hansman says. "But it's got a much more difficult time dealing with wind and turbulence on takeoff and landing." The full-scale Aeroscraft is designed to operate in winds of up to 40 knots, according to the company, but it can't outrun bad weather the way an airplane often can—the operators would have to rely on weather forecasts and conservative planning. That would be a challenge especially in extreme environments such as the Arctic, where hurricane-force winds are often sustained for days at a time.

The technical challenges, however, are probably easier to manage than the financial ones. After the P-791's successful test flight, there was talk of commercial development for cargo use in the Arctic. Today it sits, waiting for a suitor, in a hangar at Lockheed's Skunkworks facility in Palmdale, Calif.

Nathaniel Wood

Nathaniel Wood

Part of the problem with the potential airship revival: These aircraft are trying to enter the market through the back door. "Nobody's really built a cargo aircraft for the commercial cargo business in the history of aviation," Boyd says. "What they build is people-carrying aircraft, and then they convert them over to cargo."

Days after I talked with Pasternak in his Montebello office, he was on a plane. In the past few months he's been peddling his Aeroscraft everywhere from the Paris Air Show to transportation conferences in Washington, D.C., Munich, and Anchorage, Alaska. While government money paid for 75 percent of his prototype, Pasternak says, private backers will need to fund 75 percent of the first full-size, 66-ton-payload airship. He doesn't expect a single private company to write him a check. Instead, he's working on a lineup of investors. He'll build the crafts—the first two will be developed simultaneously, he says, right there in Tustin—and then spin off a separate company to lease them to private industry, just as he did with his early aerostats back in the Soviet Union. By 2020, Pasternak predicts, he'll have a fleet of 24 airships, each capable of hauling 66 tons. He views that as a first step. "What we're trying to do, we're trying to change the world completely," he says.

As I listen to Pasternak, at once so eager and so patient, I can't help but ask the obvious question: People have been talking about cargo airships for more than century. Why now? "That is very simple," he answers. "We are ready."